New App Helps Fight Porn Addiction

Three major reasons people don’t find freedom from pornography are: 1) They think victory is a destination, 2) they think they can fight this addiction alone, and 3) they want to overcome their porn problem without getting to the root of it.

These three reasons are counteracted effectively by the new app and book, Victory, which Mark Hart and I—with the help of Lifeteen—have put together. In this post, I’ll focus on the app.

Let’s look at three features of the app that address to these three topics:

1. Victory enables you to track your progress daily—three times a day, in fact: morning, noon, and night. At these times the app alerts you with a notification to “check in.”How are you doing on a scale from 1 to 3?1 being good, 3 being severely tempted. Each time you open the app, you’ll see a calendar. The gray days represent the days you’ve had setbacks, the white days are days you’ve experienced victory, and the days with green represent the days you’ve been to confession. Victory from pornography is possible, but freedom isn’t a destination you hit after a profound spiritual experience or a great counseling session. Freedom is won one day at a time by the decisions we make.

2. No recovering porn addict is an island. We need each other! The Victory app has a cool accountability feature at the top right-hand corner of every page. It’s a green shield (which many of us have begun referring to it as “The Bat Signal.”) Under settings, you can input as many as three accountability partners. Then, whenever you’re feeling severely tempted, you can click the accountability button and all three of your friends will get a notification (whether they’re in the app or not) that says, “Please pray for ___________”. Awesome, huh?

3. Pornography is a highly efficient escape behavior. When we feel upset, rejected, confused, stressed, etc. pornography promises us a quick, pleasurable escape from it all. That escape doesn’t last long, and, of course, as soon as we’re done, we’re far worse off than we were beforebut the escape is real. Many people who decide they want to be free from porn haven’t reflected upon the emotional, and external reasons they turn to porn. Victory remedies this by taking youwhen you indicate you’ve had a setbackto a page to assess your setback. It asks, were you bored, lonely, angry, stressed, tired? Then it takes you to a diary and asks two simple but very important questions: 1) What was my biggest trigger today? 2) What can I do better to fight this trigger next time? (A trigger is the thing that sends you down the path to look at porn. It can be anything from a sexually explicit advertisement to feeling lonely.) Understanding what triggers us is a big part of finding victory in the battle against porn.

Currently, the Victory app is available only on iTunes. We’re raising money for an Android version, as well as some updates we’d like to make. Every donation will be matched until the end of July, so, please, help us by donating here.